Chapter III.
Nature of Quackery.—To rely on forms or measures shows inward weakness.—“New Measures” a substitute for true strength.—Where they are in honor, ample space is found for novices and quacks.
It has been shown that the successful use of the Anxious Bench calls for no spiritual power. It is within the reach of fanaticism and error to be employed in their service, with as much facility as it may be enlisted in the service of truth. It is no argument of strength, as is often imagined, that a preacher is able to use such an agency with effect. I now go to a step farther and pronounce it an argument of spiritual weakness that he should find it either necessary or desirable to call in such help. There is a measure of quackery in the expedient, which always implies the want of strength, so far as it may be relied on at all, as being of material account in carrying on the work of God.135
Quackery consists in pretension to an inward virtue or power, which is not possessed in fact, on the ground of a mere show of the strength which such power or virtue is supposed to include. The self-styled physician who, without any knowledge of the human frame, undertakes to cure diseases by a sovereign panacea in the shape of fluid, powder, or pill, is a quack; and there is no doubt abundance of quackery in the medical profession, under more professional forms, where practice is conducted without any true professional insight and power. Such practice may at times seem eminently successful, and yet it is quackery notwithstanding. The same false show of power may, of course, come into view in every department of life. It makes up in fact a large part of the action and business of the world. Quack lawyers, quack statesmen, quack scholars, quack teachers, quack gentlemen, quacks in a word of every name and shape, meet us plentifully in every direction.136 We need not be surprised, then, to find the evil fully at home also in the sphere of religion. Indeed it might seem to be more at home here than anywhere else. Here especially the heart of man, “deceitful above all things and desperately wicked,” has shown itself most ingenious in all ages in substituting the shadow for the reality, the form for the substance, the outward for the inward. The religion of the world has always been, for the most part, arrant quackery. Paganism can exist under no other form. The mummery of Rome, as aping powers of a higher order, is the most stupendous system of quackery the world has ever witnessed. But quackery in the Church is not confined of course to Rome. Christianity, in its very nature, must ever act on the corrupt nature of man as a powerful stimulus to the evil. No system embraces such powers, inward, deep and everlasting. These man would fain appropriate and make his own, in an external way, without relinquishing himself, and entering soul and body that sphere of the Spirit in which alone they can be understood and felt. So Simon Magus dreamed of purchasing the gift of God, and clothing himself with it in the way of outward possession. He was a quack; the prototype and prince of evangelical quacks. The second century shows us the whole Christian world brilliantly illuminated with rival systems of quackery under the name of Gnosticism,137 which for a time seemed to darken the sun of truth itself by their false but powerful glare. Afterwards, under a less idealistic garb, the evil fairly enthroned itself in the Church. The Reformation was the resurrection of the Truth once more, in its genuine and original life. Luther was no quack. But Protestantism itself soon had its quacks again in plentiful profusion, and has them all the world over at the present day. Christianity, as of old, serves to call the false spirit continually into action. Some whole sects stand only in the element of quackery. And among all sects it is easy to find the same element to some extent actively at work; sometimes under one form, and sometimes under another; but always exalting the outward at the cost of the inward and promising in the power of the flesh what can never be accomplished except in the power of the spirit.
Wherever forms in religion are taken to be—we will not say the spiritual realities themselves with which the soul is concerned, for the error in that shape would be too gross—but the power and force at least by which these realities are to be apprehended, without regard to their own invisible virtue, there we have quackery in the full sense of the term. Religion must have forms, as well as an inward living force. But these can have no value, no proper reality, except as they spring perpetually from the presence of that living force itself. The inward must be the bearer of the outward. Quackery, however, reverses the case. The outward is made to bear the inward. The shrine, consecrated with the proper ceremonies, must become a shechinah. Forms have a virtue in them to bind and rule the force of things. Such forms may be exhibited in a ritual, or in a creed, or in a scheme of a religious experience mechanically apprehended; but in the end the case is substantially the same. It is quackery in the garb of religion without its inward life and power.138
That old forms are liable to be thus abused, and have been extensively thus abused in fact, is easily admitted. But it is not always recollected that new forms furnish precisely the same opportunity for the same error. It is marvelous indeed how far this seems to be overlooked by the zealous advocates of the system of New Measures in our own day. They propose to rouse the Church from its dead formalism. And to do this effectually, they strike off from the old ways of worship, and bring in new and strange practices that are adapted to excite attention. These naturally produce a theatrical effect, and this is taken at once for an evidence of waking life in the congregation. One measure, losing its power in proportion as it becomes familiar, leads to the introduction of another. A few years since a sermon was preached and published by a somewhat distinguished revivalist, in which the ground was openly taken that there must be a constant succession of new measures in the Church, to keep it alive and awake; since only in this way could we hope to counteract permanently the force of that spiritual gravitation, by which the minds of men are so prone continually to sink towards the earth in the sphere of religion.139 The philosophy this precisely by which the Church of Rome, from the fourth century downward, was actuated in all her innovations. Her worship was designed to make up through the flesh what was wanting in the spirit. The friends of new measures affect to be more free than others from the authority of mere forms. They wish not to be fettered and cramped by ordinary methods. And yet none make more account in fact of forms. They discard old forms, only to trust the more blindly in such as are new. Their methods are held to be all-sufficient for awakening sinners and effecting their conversion! They have no faith in ordinary pastoral ministrations, comparatively speaking; no faith in the Catechism. Converts made in this way are regarded with suspicion. But they have great faith in the Anxious Bench and its accompaniments. Old measures they hold to be in their very nature unfriendly to the spirit of revivals—they are the “letter that killeth”—but new measures “make alive.”140 And yet they are measures when all is done; and it is only by losing sight of the inward power of truth that any can be led to attach to them any such importance.
To rely upon the Anxious Bench, to be under the necessity of having recourse to new measures of any sort to enlist attention or produce effect in the work of the gospel, shows a want of inward spiritual force. If it be true that old forms are dead and powerless in a minister’s hands, the fault is not in the forms, but in the minister himself; and it is the very impotence of quackery to think of mending the case essentially by the introduction of new forms. The man who had no power to make himself felt in the catechetical class is deceived most assuredly and deceives others when he seems to be strong in the use of the anxious bench. Let the power of religion be present in the soul of him who is called to serve at the altar, and no strange fire will be needed to kindle the sacrifice. He will require no new measures. His strength will appear rather in resuscitating, and clothing with their ancient force the institutions and services already established for his use. The freshness of a divine life, always young and always new, will stand forth to view in forms that before seemed sapless and dead.